He’d come before dawn, just six hours before graduation. I was sleeping lightly. I heard the barn door creak. He climbed the ladder, and from halfway up he tossed a bottle of liquor onto the bed. I could feel it hit the mattress; I could hear the cramped slosh of fluid. It sounded one-third empty.
“What time is it?” I asked, sitting up.
He said, “Night.” His legs swung off the ledge of the loft. I had the idea he might jump, though he would not have gone far. If I could have taken his pain, I would have, because my love for him was undiminished. You hear of paralyzed people who send signals to sleeping limbs. Or amputees who feel phantom tingling in parts that no longer exist. Despite his violent removal, all the space around me that he had occupied still belonged to Jack. Not a day passed without me sending signals to missing pieces.
“I could cut my wrists,” he said, “put a bullet through my skull. If I thought I could reach you. But nothing can reach you.”
I guided his head to the basin of my lap. I brushed back his hair, and unraveled the many knots. If I was cruel, I did not feel cruel. I felt new. I’d met the darker side of life; I’d met its animal. The animal came to me because it knew me. Jack understood what I’d become. I could tell by the wonder and the disgust in his eyes.
“Every time I see a flower,” he said as he wept, “it’s your favorite.”
——
Kate fanned the air as she fastened his robe. “You reek of alcohol.”
Jack lifted his chin. “Quick,” he said sarcastically, “hand me a mint.”
“Where’s your cap?” she asked him as we stood to take our places in line.
“Daniel!” he bellowed. Dan’s head emerged from the crowd. Jack clapped, going, “Chuck it.” Dan snapped his wrist, and the hat came gliding over like a square Frisbee from line L-Z to line A-K.
The band began to play the school song, and we all inched through the halls in two lines. Andie Anderson and Brett Lawler were each the head of a line, and the first to reach the auditorium doors. They stopped, and we all stopped in succession, crashing somewhat. Andie’s legs were jiggling beneath her gown as she waited for her cue—her knees were poking like horse noses running a race in tandem. At the first note of “Pomp and Circumstance,” Andie and Brett received the signal to go, while every next person was held by the shoulders for a count of two, then released with a solemn press to the small of the back.
Inside, the auditorium was inky and stifling. Parents and extended families filled the seats, and teachers papered the walls, craning their necks, fanning themselves with programs—all eagerly bearing witness to our indoctrination. We were being given over, who knows to what. The sad truth is that there is no original future. From my chair on the platform, I had an unobstructed view of Denny’s mother, Elaine, who was weeping in the front row. The shank of doughy flesh under her arm wagged as she leaned down to hunt through her pocketbook for a tissue. To prevent Denny from being late, she had changed all the clocks in the house, and she got him to the school two hours early. Unfortunately, it was so early that Denny went downstairs to sleep in the wrestling room and nearly missed the whole thing anyway.
In his valedictory speech, Stephen Auchard spoke of promises and responsibilities while everyone was thinking primarily of the rewards of lunch. He could not say what he really thought, whatever it was that that may have been, if in fact his real thoughts were even known to him. But he had not been singled out for the inventiveness of his sentiments. He’d been chosen as the one most brilliantly weaned of idiosyncrasy. Stephen returned to the seat next to mine, and I bumped against him, giving him a small thumbs-up. Poor guy. He wanted to be a surgeon. One day we would meet again, one day in the distant future, one day when I required surgery, though at the time it was hard to imagine what part of me might need to be cut.
Principal Laughlin beamed and shook my hand like he meant it when he presented my diploma. On it, my name had been carefully written in veering script: Eveline Aster Auerbach. People shouted that name exactly as I read it—people I knew and others I did not know, all clapping loudly. Clapping is bizarre. Powell says in certain places people do not do it. In certain places they call out in repetitive hoots, going, loo, loo, loo.
Afterward, my parents were in the lobby, Marilyn and Powell too. It was strange to see them there, representing me. From a distance they seemed credible, semi-sociable, and nicely dressed, making it hard to tell strictly by the look of them that they knew nothing about me. They were standing with Coco’s parents, discussing college acceptances as though they’d played some part in the process, as though they’d helped with applications or offered money. Mr. and Mrs. Hale had visited ten schools with Coco, often staying at four-star hotels, where Coco got massages.
“I can’t believe Coco’s going to Amherst,” Denny said one day during finals when he came to see me at my window in my house. He pulled his chair closer to mine. “For political science. Bitch.”
He came every day to keep me company, bringing presents—chocolates and hyacinths and rocks he’d painted, these portraits in gouache. I had eleven, all propped against the window screen: Alicia, Sara, Kate, Stephen Auchard, Lilias Starr, Mom and Powell and Denny’s mother—all on one rock, Eddie from the record store, Marty Koch holding the new yearbook, Coach Slater, the new logo Denny had designed for Atomic Tangerine, and of course, Elvis. “Which is your favorite?” he asked.
I pointed to Elvis. It looked exactly like Denny.
“Really? I happen to like Coach Slater. I mean, I know she’s not your favorite person, but the workmanship is by far the best. Do you know she sat for three hours? Did I tell you?”
He reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and removed the latest. There wasn’t much room left on the window. I’d have to start a second row.
“Your father mailed me a photo,” he said as he placed it in front of me. On the irregular saucer-sized rock was a masterful replica of Chihuahua Man. He was wearing a starched yellow dress shirt, and all four dog heads were floating around him like alter egos. “I used a toothbrush to do the fur,” he said. “I cut off all but ten bristles then melted back the toothbrush wall with a blowtorch.”
I thanked him, and together we looked out the window.
“I forgot to tell you,” he remarked soberly. “L.B. got off the waiting list at Tulane. He’s going for pre-med. I mean, can you imagine getting him as your gynecologist? Or Coco as a lobbyist for the lumber or sugar industry? It terrifies me to think of these people with checking accounts and voting rights. They’ll reverse the progress of the entire preceding generation! We’re doomed.”
I pressed my Chihuahua rock against my cheek. It was warm. Denny must have had it on the dashboard in his car. It was strange how much things had changed since we were kids, or since we’d started high school. No one was liberated, not the way my mother and her friends had been—free from consensus and imitation. No one wore homemade clothes or marched on Washington anymore. The closest we’d come to history was Jack and Smokey getting arrested at Shoreham power plant for climbing the fence during an anti-nuke demonstration.
Record store Eddie hadn’t received a single inquiry in the “Ask Eddie” box for months. Everyone just read Rolling Stone as if there were nothing to learn about music beyond what magazine editors saw fit to present, as if published information could ever truly be free of advertiser influence. “It’s not that they don’t care about answers; they don’t even know how to ask questions anymore,” Eddie told me and Kate.
Even feminism had been stripped of its legitimacy and relegated to tasteless jokes about women picking up dinner date checks or carrying their own luggage or standing on buses while men sit. There’d been some collapse, some shattering of invisible walls, some backlash from liberalism, some conservative revival. And yet, no matter where you stood idealistically, your involvement couldn’t be willed away: everyone bore some responsibility. If Denny, Jack, Kate, Dan, and I represented one extreme, and Coco, L.B., Pip, and Nico repres
ented the opposite, we were still relatives of the hour. Society had never felt more like a bizarre arrangement.
“Have you ever seen something normal magnified that ends up looking like tubes?” I asked.
“Yes,” Denny said right away. “Bark.”
“Once I saw something,” I said, “possibly bark. It was a gnarled mass of tunnels. Maybe there’s similar architecture to society, only more fragile, like a nest of twisted glass that gives us shape but that can shatter at any instant from the slightest stress.” Jack’s absence was conspicuous; I felt the trauma of not having him to complete me, to interpret for me. I added, “I imagine they look like glass canals.”
“Neat,” Denny said, encouragingly, obviously relieved that I was talking. “Like an ant colony, only positive space, not negative.”
Denny seemed to understand, so I continued. “It’s like, we work and work to construct these systems for the good—civil rights, the environment, mind expansion—then they all shatter, like fragile avenues, like they were too delicate to sustain weight. Maybe there’s a limit to human tolerance for idealism.”
“It’s true. For a while we were doing well,” Denny said. “But no change is ever secure so long as someone else has the incentive to blow it off. Look at reconstruction in the South. You get the tragedy of the Civil War, the beauty of the Gettysburg Address, the death of Lincoln, and racists still figure out how to segregate the South—through legislation!” Denny adjusted his chair. “Then again, difference is essential to freedom. And to adaptation. No one wants a fascist state.”
“Maybe everything that gets built has to fall apart,” I said.
“Maybe. The process shakes us from complacency, and inspires us to build new avenues. In fact, it might not even be mechanically possible to have acts of liberalism without conservatism, or heroism without cowardice, or revolution without tyranny—”
“Or love without loss,” I said, and I don’t know, with Denny there, I just started to cry.
He reached to hold me. “Don’t worry, honey. He’ll be back.”
——
“Eveline is going to NYU,” my mother was telling Coco’s parents, “to study art history.”
I stood a little behind them. Coco was there too, with shiny coral lips and newly frosted hair, sipping cola from a clear plastic glass.
My father looked confused. He turned to Powell. “What happened to art?”
Powell just shrugged. “Or photography?”
I did not wish my parents any harm; however, I didn’t know why I should have wished them well either, beyond the obvious fact that they were nice people. I didn’t even think I had anything good to inherit. The dictionary says a parent is any animal, organism, or plant in relation to its offspring, and so of course, in that explicit regard, I was their child. Yet they’d set my soul adrift, tending to themselves with the urgency due me, believing me capable because they needed me to be capable, never guessing that their faith in my strength would not make it fact, or that I might grow dangerously weary of sufficiency. Maman had seen through my mask of adequacy. She’d loved without hope for profit the girl she’d found, but Maman was dead. Rourke had not insisted upon my competence either. He had not even seemed to notice it. There was something else in me he wanted, something small and discrete—the frailty in me, and my frailty adored him.
My father tugged his jacket cuffs. His hands were beautifully proportioned. My hands were the same, and it depressed me somewhat to be faced with my DNA like that. Maybe everything was hopelessly predetermined, them to me, me to the next.
“Thanks for coming,” I said to the four of them, and they said that I was very welcome.
Sometimes a day is a symbolic day, and you behave symbolically. Sometimes you search inside for a feeling, and, finding none, you remember that no feeling is frequently the most possible feeling.
At Spring Close House for graduation lunch, it was me; Mom; Dad; Marilyn; Powell; Kate and her brother, Laurent, and sister-in-law, Simone, with their baby, Jean-Claude. Jean-Claude was cute except for the way his head came together at the temples like he’d been plucked out with cob tongs. Laurent also had a head shaped that way, sort of like a guitar. Looking out the window, I felt mostly lonely. It was the kind of loneliness that cannot see past itself, a skulking suspicion that the world was not mine to inherit. I listened as they spoke, laughed when they laughed, raised my glass as such moments presented themselves, all the while marking time. I was sorry for the way everyone imagined my life to be my own, for the way they really did seem to like me, asking did my fish still have bones, and how pretty I looked. I wished I could give something back. But yet, I knew that all that they wanted from me was all that they needed from me, and that is a treacherous path to consent to travel, in the sense of suppressing things sought for the self. That is to say, you being solely what others want you to be.
After appetizers, Dad neatened the table, scraping crumbs with the flat of a knife, and Jean-Claude gnawed his mother’s necklace. When the strand snapped, everyone dove and hunted on their knees for scattered pearls, which was a strange and spirited sort of family happening.
Marilyn brushed her skirt and sat again. “When do you leave for Montreal?”
Laurent deposited a handful of beads into the ashtray. “In an hour or two. We’re hoping the baby will sleep before we stop for dinner.”
“Have you finished packing, Catherine?” Simone asked.
Kate shrugged. “Except for what I’ll pick up in August.”
“And what about you, Powell,” Marilyn asked. “Your next job’s in South America?”
“Brazil,” he said, putting his arm around my mother. “I actually leave this evening.”
My lips paused over the rim of my drinking glass, which smelled the dusty way water smells if you stop to let it. A smell like a long thin tedium, listless like an elderly neighbor’s kitchen with cracked linoleum and spilled prescriptions and overpainted cabinets that do not sufficiently shut. Like the knowledge of passing things.
“What was that man saying to you?” my mother whispered audibly to my father when he returned from paying the check.
“Which man was that?” Dad wanted to know.
“The tall one with the fish tie.”
“Fish tie,” he pondered, looking around. “I think I would have remembered a fish tie.”
Back at home, Kate flitted in loose circles, gathering up the last of her things. I sat on a wicker hamper stuffed with all her fabric scraps and sewing notions and waited while she zipped and tied the last of her luggage. Beneath me the basket bent and squeaked with that slightly bending wicker sound. I wondered how Kate would do. I wondered whether a femininity so refined is not ominously reliant upon the beneficence of circumstance. I guessed she would do fine. Lots of women are out there, doing fine.
“Isn’t this pretty?” she said of her dress. “It’s chambray.”
When she finished packing, we took Mom’s car for a drive down Three Mile Harbor Road to the bay. Darts of sun pierced the trees, breaking up the retiring darkness with pools of apricot. We listened to “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” by The Beatles, hitting rewind on the tape deck whenever it ended. First I did it once, then twice, then she did it. And when she did it, it was different. It was like pouring bronze over a bird’s nest, casting the moment in metal. There was this understanding that of all the songs we’d heard together, that one would be the last. The beach was empty, despite the early June heat. She parked near the fishing station, by the channel, where the strip of sand was curved and rocky.
“Careful,” she said to me. “There’s a broken bottle.”
We lay on the stony sand and watched the boats return to harbor. The water was twinkling and distinguished. In the theater you can make water by waving bolts of silk from one end of the stage to the other, and sometimes real water looks that way.
Kate began to cry; I thought about the song. But instead she said, “I keep thinking about Harrison.” Her tear
s congealed in her eyes like pudding. I was thinking what a simple creature she was—we were. Maybe I would take her hand and lay it on my neck, make her say his name again, have her feel my throat convulse. Feel the acid echo, the disease in me.
“Here,” I said, stretching my shirt to wipe her eyes. Above us the birds soared triumphantly, arcing, diving, chasing each last swoop.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, “for ruining our last afternoon.”
I rested my head on her middle. Her babies would come from there. How sad, not to know them. “Don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry.”
Sara asked if I was okay. She was driving. I said I was fine. If I said it uncertainly, it was because the armrest was pressing into my spine. I was facing her, not the street—I could not bear to face the street. The street was like a plank shooting off into nothing. There’s this cartoon where the main character drops black vinyl circles onto the ground behind him for his pursuer to fall into. It’s a scary concept—circles being holes, and strange to explain, but in fact that was exactly how I was doing.
“I’m sorry I missed Kate,” she said. “Was it hard to say goodbye?”
“Not really. The baby was crying.”
There were no more places to park by Alicia’s, so we drove to Apaquogue Road and walked back. The Ross house was shaped like a sideways barn, only it was a mansion. On the right was a screened terrace room, and on the left was the driveway, which, like the walkway, was lined with paper bags filled with sand and burning candles.
“Look at this tree,” I said, pointing up as we passed it. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Is it a maple?”
“No,” I said, “it’s a copper beech.”
Though we could see that guests were gathered on the lawn behind the house, we went through the main entrance. The porch was gracious and white with pink geraniums. Sara put her pocketbook in the front hall closet, and she handed a graduation gift for Alicia to a uniformed woman. I offered a bunch of wildflowers I’d picked from the garden near the barn.
Anthropology of an American Girl Page 30
